Moving offices

It has been admittedly a rather long time since I posted here. The main reason for the hiatus was moving my business out of my home office and to new office premises. This all went fairly smoothly although it is very strange to not be working from home after three and a half years of my commute being up the stairs and into the attic!

The office move encouraged a decision that I have been wanting to make for a while – to go entirely to Linux for my business desktop machines. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Linux on the desktop for years, but never quite made a complete switch, and a lot of that was because my business and personal computing needs were linked. As a writer I need Microsoft Word for compatibility. In my business however, I mainly edit text files all day, and the type of office documents I need to edit are fairly basic and OpenOffice.org copes with them just fine.

I figured I could always switch back if it went horribly wrong so not only did I move offices on February 14th … I switched operating systems. We are now running with a Linux domain controller doing all the network logins using Samba (replacing the absolute nightmare that is Active Directory) and also handling DNS and Linux + KDE on the desktop, and it’s all gone incredibly well.

Back at home my Windows desktop looks horribly old fashioned and clunky after working all day on the loveliness that is KDE, but it needed replacing anyway, so for my writing and my general pootering around at home … I’m going to be getting me a Mac Mini. Thanks for all the advice in my previous thread, the office move has removed some of my issues anyway – I’m dealing with the QuickBooks issue and the need for Windows for browser testing by using my laptop which covers me if I need that at home and at work.